“Sorryif I woke you.”
She waves a hand. “You didn’t. Doug’s snoring, as usual. Anyways, glad I caught you.” She pulls a mug from the cabinet above the coffee machine, pours herself a cup. “Your graduation,” she says, and I wish I’d already taken that Advil I was thinking about. “That’s still on, right?”
I blink at her. “Yes, it’s still on.” I hope she can’t hear the hitch in my voice, the fear that it’s not. “Why would you ask me that?”
She shrugs, pulling creamer from the fridge and adding it to her coffee. “Oh, you know,” she says, then trails off with a light laugh, but we both know what comes afterthatyou know.
You know Greer can’t alwaysfollow through
You never know what might go wrong, when itcomes to Greer
For the barest of seconds I imagine replacing all her wrinkle cream with mayonnaise.
“Why,Ava?” I repeat.
“It’s no biggie. I’ll have my understudy go on that day. I just wantedto make sure.”
Herunderstudy. There’s nothing so official happening in the theater where Ava does her shows, but I wouldn’t say so. I know it’s special to her, the thing she looks forward to most every year. “It’s okay if you can’t make it.” I’m still holding the Cheerios box; I’ve tugged it toward my chest like it’s a teddy bear.
Ava’s unlined face compresses in a moue of disbelief. “Don’t be silly,” she says, and I know she means it. I know she wouldn’t miss it. She’s never missed anything for me, anytime I’ve needed her, and I hope over the last couple of years I’ve shown her how grateful I am for that. As she moves to leave the kitchen, she squeezes my shoulder and leans in, giving me a smacking kiss on the cheek. When she pulls back, she pauses, looking so like my mom that I lower my eyes. “You doing your exercises?”
“Yep. Feeling good today.”
She drifts past me, moving down the hall to head upstairs. “Greens,” she calls back, her voice light, musical. Ava used to sing me to sleep sometimes, when I’d had a bad day. Britney Spears’s “Lucky,” which is probably the most embarrassing minor personal fact I can think of about myself. “You’ll let me know if anythingchanges, yeah?”
I look down at Kenneth, who’s staring up at me, eyes narrowed in judgment, though whether it’s at me or at Ava or our dynamic together is another of his private, feline mysteries. “Yeah,” I say. “Ofcourse I will.”
* * * *
Barden Camera is a narrow, cramped store, slightly mildewy in smell and buzzy with the sound of an overworked air conditioner. The lone salesclerk is a man named Bart who is talkative in a way that suggests an undercurrent of loneliness; behind the glass case counters he’s got a small television turned on, muted, a twenty-four-hour news station flashy with images and tickers andtalking heads.
For a guy who doesn’t like being in one place, being stuck—this must be a panic attack petri dish.
“I could show you something else too,” Bart says loudly, setting his hands on his hips and looking down at the two cameras he has set out on top of the glass case that functions as a countertop. “I’ve got a used D500 in the back that’d—”
Beside me, I hear rather than see Alex scrape a hand over the edge of his jaw, thickly stubbled this morning. I’d shown up five minutes early, but he’d already been outside, leaning casually against the brick wall of a neighboring storefront. Even with the beard coming in he’d looked better rested, had smiled at me and said, “Hello, Greer,” as though it was the most natural thing in the world for us to meet on a Tuesday morningin my hometown.
I’m too afraid to look over at him, to see the effect this must behaving on him.
“No, that’s okay,” I say, sending Bart what I hope is a placating smile and not a clenched-teeth nervous grimace. “I think it’s going to be between these two. Can we have a minute? I promise I’ll decide really fast.”
“No problem, no problem,” Bart says, because he’s the kind of guy who fills the space up with talk, even if it’s repetition. “Time for my medicine, anyway.” He mimes drinking something. “I mean coffee, of course! Four cups before noon, that’s how I do it—”
“Thanks, Bart,” says Alex, the first time he’s spoken in a while. It’s gentler, kinder than the way he spoke to the professor on Monday, but there’s the same quiet quality of command to it, and Bart nods happily and ducks through a dingy maroon curtain into the back of the store.
“Oh, God,” I whisper, putting a hand to my forehead. “I’m sorry. Do you want towait outside?”
“No.”
I finally get up the courage to look over at him, expecting the worst, a fluorescent-lit version of Alex on Friday night, but instead he looks calm, a little teasing, one dark eyebrow raised and a crooked smile on his lips, less white knight and more dashing rogue. He drops his eyes to the counter, where he’s got the spec sheet I gave him on the way in, and taps it once with his index finger. He lowers his voice, leans down to me slightly, I guess so Bart can’t hear him, or else so he can remind me of his magnetic face, voice, everything.
“I just—you don’t need a D500.” He leans back, speaks at a normal volume again. “Either one of these’ll get you what you need for your class, but frankly it’s bullshit your professor wants this kind of equipmentfor beginners.”
I suppress a smile at this, Alex’s continued hostility toward Hiltunen, which seems entirely borne out of the way he’d treated me. “How’d you learn?” I ask him.
“Nothing so fancy as this.” He briefly lifts and then sets down the older model Nikon Bart’s put out for me. It hadn’t taken me long to realize the used cameras were more in my price range; in fact I’m pretty sure I hiccupped in shock at the price of the first one Bart offered, and for all his blustering energy, he’d taken the hint quickly. “I had a teacher who gave me an old FG. Thirty-five millimeter, if you can believe it. Actual film.”
“That’s the one you used for the picture at Kit’s?” She loves that picture, the one above her fireplace—ice-encased branches of a tree set against a clear blue sky, so bright and sharp that you can feel the coldcoming off it.
